For years, Ingress-NGINX was the default choice for exposing Kubernetes applications.
It was simple, open-source, widely supported, and became the “standard” way for beginners to run ingress traffic.
But the Kubernetes world has changed — Ingress-NGINX is no longer recommended, and many organizations have already moved away from it. Even the maintainers have reduced active support, major features are frozen, and the project has publicly acknowledged serious architectural limitations.
This article explains:
Why Ingress-NGINX is being deprecated
What changed in Kubernetes networking
History behind maintainers stepping away
Technical limitations
Better alternatives to migrate to
📉 1. Why We Are Deprecating Ingress-NGINX
1.1. The project has reached a maintenance bottleneck
Ingress-NGINX is an extremely complex controller built on top of NGINX’s Lua subsystem, template rendering, and custom patches. Over time:
Maintaining compatibility with upstream NGINX became harder
Patching security vulnerabilities required deep C-level knowledge
Very few contributors had the necessary expertise
Maintainers themselves stated that the project has a very small active maintainer base and cannot guarantee long-term updates.
1.2. NGINX (upstream) did not collaborate actively
Key reasons maintainers mentioned:
Lack of official support from NGINX Inc.
Breaking changes in NGINX requiring heavy rewrites
No guarantee of long-term API compatibility
Because of this, the project constantly lagged behind upstream NGINX releases.
1.3. Ingress API became too limiting
Kubernetes' built-in Ingress API is intentionally minimal. It does not support:
Advanced routing
Authentication flows
Canary deployments
Rate limiting
Circuit breaking
Traffic splitting
mTLS
TCP/UDP routing
To support these, Ingress-NGINX had to build hundreds of annotations, which became impossible to maintain.
Users ended up with:
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-body-size: "0"
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: "/"
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect: "false"
...
(50 more annotations)
This complexity is exactly why Kubernetes introduced Gateway API.
1.4. The future of Kubernetes Networking → Gateway API
Gateway API (GA since 2023) replaces Ingress.
It provides:
Standardized CRDs beyond Ingress
Better extensibility for vendors
First-class support for L4/L7 traffic controls
Cleaner routing
Cross-namespace & multi-tenant support
No annotations hack
Ingress-NGINX cannot evolve into Gateway API cleanly — it’s stuck with the old model.
1.5. Performance & architectural limitations
NGINX-based controllers have:
High memory consumption
Less efficient multi-tenant isolation
Slow reload times (config reloads entire NGINX)
No native support for modern protocols (HTTP/3, gRPC-web, etc.)
Modern proxies like Envoy outperform NGINX heavily in Kubernetes-native environments.
🕰️ 2. History: Why Maintainers Stopped / Reduced Support
Phase 1: 2016–2019
Ingress-NGINX was the most popular ingress option because:
Kubernetes did not have Gateway API
Only a few ingress controllers existed
NGINX was stable and familiar
Phase 2: 2020–2022 — The “Annotation Hell" Era
Dev teams struggled maintaining 100+ annotations.
Features were overlapping, incompatible, or buggy.
Phase 3: 2023 — Gateway API announced stable
Ingress API became a legacy interface.
Controller maintainers openly discussed:
“Ingress is too limiting
We cannot implement advanced traffic controls
Gateway API will replace this.”
Phase 4: 2024-2025 — Reduced active maintenance
Maintainers publicly noted:
Huge backlog of issues
Not enough skilled contributors
Major CVEs pending for months
Nginx upstream incompatibilities
Move toward Kubernetes-native proxies
While not “archived”, the project is effectively in slow maintenance mode — not evolving and not future-proof.
🚫 3. Technical Reasons You Should Stop Using Ingress-NGINX
3.1. Annotations are fragile and vendor-specific
Your configuration is locked to NGINX.
If you switch controller → everything breaks.
3.2. Lack of advanced traffic management
Compared to modern ingress options, NGINX lacks:
Canary releases
Weighted routing
Retry policies
Circuit breakers
mTLS per route
Traffic shadowing
3.3. Scaling causes full reloads
Every config change → restarts the entire NGINX worker group.
This causes:
latency spikes
dropped connections
slow rollouts
3.4. No native multi-tenant support
NGINX has no concept of:
cross-namespace routing
delegated traffic governance
namespace isolation policies
Gateway API fixes this.
⭐ 4. Best Alternatives to Ingress-NGINX (2025)
✅ 1. Envoy-based Proxies
Istio Gateway / Envoy Gateway
Best for:
Microservices
Zero-downtime routing
Advanced L7 traffic engineering
Benefits:
Native Gateway API support
No reloads (Envoy is xDS-based)
mTLS, retries, canaries, traffic splitting built-in
✅ 2. Traefik
Best for:
Simpler environments
Kubernetes dashboards
High-performance basic routing
Benefits:
Native Gateway API support
Auto TLS
No reloads
Simple CRDs
✅ 3. HAProxy Ingress / HAProxy Gateway
Best for:
High performance
Low latency
Large-scale clusters
Benefits:
Mature HAProxy engine
Strong Gateway API roadmap
✅ 4. NGINX Gateway Fabric (New – replaces Ingress-NGINX)
NGINX Inc. now maintains this instead of Ingress-NGINX.
Benefits:
Built for Gateway API
Modern architecture
Actively maintained
No annotations
Why it’s better:
Ingress-NGINX → old, annotation hack
NGINX Gateway Fabric → new, clean, Kubernetes-native
📦 5. If You Still Use Ingress-NGINX, What Should You Do?
Short-term
Lock your version
Apply CVE patches manually
Avoid complex annotations
Long term (Recommended)
Plan migration to a Gateway API controller
Choose Envoy Gateway or NGINX Gateway Fabric
Begin rewriting Ingress rules → Routes + Gateways
📝 Conclusion
Ingress-NGINX served the Kubernetes community incredibly well for years.
But the world of cloud-native routing has evolved:
The Ingress API is outdated
NGINX architecture doesn’t fit modern service mesh needs
Maintainers cannot keep up
Gateway API is the future
If you're starting a new project in 2025 or planning an upgrade — do not use Ingress-NGINX.
The ecosystem is moving forward, and so should your architecture.
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